What software should I get for my digital camera?

Your camera will come with all the software you need. Now let's talk
about other software you might want.

Photo Editing software

Want to do some serious "darkroom" work? Tweaking contrast, improving
color, building collages, going for special effects? You can do amazing things
to improve images. You can enhance color, brighten underexposed regions of the
photo, correct contrast and exposure problems. You can even get rid of power
lines and trash cans.

The industry standard is Adobe Photoshop. It is powerful, fairly difficult
to learn, and expensive.

Paint Shop Pro is my choice. It, too, is
powerful, but it is easier to learn and is inexpensive. You can download
a 30-day free trial. It will even
do a few things better than Photoshop.

Transfer and viewing software

Digital cameras store a lot of hidden (EXIF) information about each photo in
each image file. With the right software, you can view the date, time, aperture,
shutter speed, flash setting, etc. of the image. This software also conveniently
allows you to move files from your camera to a directory of your choosing, rotate
images that were taken in portrait mode. Some will rename the photo based on
the hidden information.

My favorite is P.I.E. This is the first
software that touches every one of my images. Here is what it does for me:

It transfers all the images from the memory card to my hard drive in a directory
of my choosing. In the process it renames the files using a user definable
system employing date and time of the photo, exposure, etc.

It allows me to quickly go through all the images in the directory, viewing
them at full screen size. I can view any of the hidden image information at
the same time.

It allows me to rotate any portrait mode image to its proper orientation
losslessly. Most software will degrade JPG camera images when it rotates them.
P.I.E. does not degrade the image quality on rotation.

It allows me to delete any obvious bad photos immediately.

It has a handy slide-show mode for displaying a directory of images.

This software does not do much, but it does some of the most frequent and important
tasks and does these tasks very, very well. It is only $19.95. It is available
from www.picmeta.com, along with a free
trial download.

Irfanview is a very popular free utility
that does many of the same things. It will also display a slide show of images.
I do not like it as much as P.I.E. Its full screen images are of lower quality,
and I find it a bit more cumbersome to use. However, it does have batch resize
capability, and it is free. I include Irfanview on any CD's of images I give
to friends.

Automatic web page creation

A few of you need to get galleries of photos of events up with minimal effort
and editing. What you want are collections of thumbnail size images linked to
pages with larger versions of the same image. Click
here for an example.

My favorite by far is Thumbnailer
from www.smalleranimals.com. It
is fantastic and only $29.95. It will resize the images, create all the HTML,
and put in the links, all automatically. It has tremendous potential for customization
if you so desire.

I shoot a lot of photos at church events, including our church's house-building
trip in Kentucky each summer. At the end of the day I am tired and I want
to get the day's photos up fast. This make the job effortless.

An alternative for this is the software Thumbs
Plus, which does quite a few other image organizing tasks, too. For web
page creation, I definitely prefer Thumbnailer. I find it creates pages that
are easier to navigate, and it is cheaper.